"They really named their company Gund-ARM then only built legs." - Hayley
"What's your favourite mobile suit genital? Mine's the GUNDvolva." - Hayley
Major entries in Gundam should always be 50 episodes. It's a character driven speculative fiction franchise. Ideas need to be explored in depth, characters given breathing room to feel more like fully realised people and the weight of real time spent watching the show makes audiences more attached to everything going on. 50 episodes provides opportunities for the occasional bout of strange creativity (both of the boy band hoverbikes kind and the "Chibodee Crocket is scared of clowns because one pulled a gun on him as a child"). I could argue that 39 would be sufficient for The Witch From Mercury as a parallel to Revolutionary Girl Utena, but one should never start low when bargaining. Besides, Utena is a three act character drama. The Witch From Mercury is as much about class struggle and a critique of charter schools as it is angst-riddled students organising duels. Alas, Bandai Namco is a media dragon sitting on a hoard of immense cultural riches with absolutely no idea how to manage the wealth at all. The Witch From Mercury began development as a 40th Anniversary project, delayed due to work on both Gundam Hathaway and SEED Freedom and treated as this awkward annoyance to punt out the door as soon as possible in favour of those two seemingly safe bet movies. Somehow, the latest television entry of a cultural icon so large it has a statue in Odaiba and annual fireworks shows became an underdog passion project.
Much like how Iron Blooded Orphans feels like a response to Gundam 00, so too can a new line be drawn to The Witch From Mercury. The grit and grime has been powerwashed, polished and varnished over with a corporate sheen. The firearms and clubs of Iron Blooded Orphans have been followed up with a show that almost exclusively uses beams for both projectiles and close combat. Iron Blooded Orphans introduced a single wire-controlled remote weapon in its later stages. The Aerial has more funnels than a Qubeley and more i-fields than a Zanscare wheel in Episode 1. Prosthetics and human-machine interfacting continues its exploration begun in Thunderbolt. We've moved from crude replacements of limbs for Daryl to the invasive surgeries of the Alaya-Vijnana System to now a story where a superconductor allows for far less invasive integration between the biological and mechanical. That's not to say it's any less dangerous; instead of breaking your spine the risk of Permet-infused GUND formatting is simply that you fry every nerve in your body at once.
Even as the limited episode count and tiny core staff prevented the sort of complex background details of a Reconguista in G or even some episodes of Iron Blooded Orphans, the shot composition is so damn great. Miorine doesn't merely lock herself in a room at her lowest, the viewer can only see her through gaps in the blinds; a prison of her own making. When Miorine confronts Suletta about her slavish devotion to whatever her mother directs, their reflections are mirrored in a ripened tomato for Miorine and one still immature for Suletta. All text-based communication is written in English and there's all sorts of neat world and character building details floating on those screens if you take the time to pause. There aren't many characters in the frame at any time but there's so much care to how they move that conveys so much personality. There's not enough episodes to flesh out the cast the way they should be so this sort of detailing is vital to keep the show strong. There's none of the sloppy low detail characters made entirely of tween frames in long distance shots like Iron Blooded Orphans infamously used a few times either. Yes, I am aware of episode 3 Atra. I said nothing because as a woman I understand that sometimes girls need to be a little silly.
Let's run a quick plot summary. This is another series reboot. We are once again in the Jeff Bezos style earth/space relationship like G Gundam where Earth is a slum and the space colonies are the domain of the rich. There's colonies as far out as Mercury but they're mostly for mining permet, some sort of superconductor capable of faster, more complex information processing than fibre optic cables. It's great for data storage, long range communication, advanced vehicular control and most recently experiments in human-machine interfacing and prosthetics. As mentioned before, there's a high risk of it frying your nervous system. There's a company trying to get this technology right, but like everyone else in the tech sector their funding comes from weapons development. A grizzled retired military officer, traumatised by how many soldiers' lives he's seen ruined by this tech, stages a corporate takeover of a major weapons conglomerate and establishing its own paramilitary. At the same time he has everyone involved in GUND interface research assassinated. One researcher from the medical department survives and winds up working for a subordinate weapons manufacturer. The other (Elnora Samaya) survives thanks to her 4 year old daughter (Ericht Samaya) interfacing extremely well with the GUND format. This unfortunately puts such a strain on the child's body that her consciousness has to be entirely transferred into a permet-driven cloud-based storage system, loaded onto the gundam carrying her. Her mother, obviously scarred and furious by this, continually attempts to clone the daughter, eventually succeeding on the 12th attempt. She raises this child as her second daughter and sets about training her as part of an elaborate scheme to both take revenge on those who wronged her and to obtain another tech research project which could possibly allow her eldest daughter to have a physical presence in the Earth Sphere despite remaining a purely digital being.
This plan involves enrolling the second daughter, Suletta, into a charter school with frequent non-lethal mobile suit duels. By doing so, sufficient testing can be performed on the first daughter Ericht on board her gundam now named Aerial in order to see if the crazy technological solution is possible. At the same time, access to that classified project is possible through a combination of Elnora, under the alias Prospera Mercury politicking her way through this corporate conglomerate (The Benerit Group) and a funny clause in the school's duels meaning Suletta is now engaged to the CEO's daughter. A whole lot of events happen from there. Our heroes start a medical company with the worst announcement trailer in history. There is a girl with puffy hair in the shape of cartoony monkey ears. This is a joke about Revolutionary Girl Utena's mascot character Chuchu.
Ever since the one-two punch of Gundam SEED Destiny being total garbage and Gundam 00 scaring the most boring nerds alive, Bandai Namco has been terrified of fan discourse. Thus, there's often little stunts pulled at the launch of a new show to assuage any fears. Usually this means preview screenings of a new entry's first three episodes at a cinema but with The Witch From Mercury a single episode set 21 years prior to the main events was produced. In a perfect world this wouldn't need to exist. We'd all be adults about letting fiction take the time to say its piece, create mysteries then answer them in time. Alas there's investors to appease and angry keyboard warriors to mitigate and so we reveal a large pile of information which doesn't necessarily need to be known going in. It's all very "secondary screen" friendly design but the memories of watching this show and its conversations week to week are still fresh in my mind. By covering a pile of Lore Details(tm), conversations were all about the characters and themes of the show. Less time contemplating technologies and identities, more time on how everyone will reacts and where they'll go. I'm kind of torn on how well the prologue directed audiences to think about the show more intelligently, but as a singular text it's such an excellent piece of direction anyway. I've seen this dang episode four or five times now and if anything I'm crying more on the later watches knowing exactly what candles 4 year old Ericht Samaya is going to extinguish and how it's going to impact her mother.
Then episode 1 says The Line.
Sure Gundam has been queer since Char used Garma's shower and reminisced about all the gay sex they had in military school. Sure Atra Bernstein grew up to become a politician's lesbian tradwife. Iron Blooded Orphans still had to sneak its gay male tragedy and canon gay marriage right at the end before Bandai Namco could pull the plug entirely. 43 years in, Gundam is finally looking directly at the camera and undeniably shouting at the audience "this is about homosexuality." I'm writing this 3 years after the premiere and it's still such a thrill to watch unfold. We're finally doing it. The only real criticism to make is that in a franchise so frequently fixated on men, a lesbian couple is the first to take the focus like this. There's a degree to which women loving women can be seen as more palatable to the straight cisgender men in the audience and thus it's a safer bet than gay men would be. It's hard to complain when Suletta Mercury and Miorine Rembran may as well be the ur-lesbian couple in modern fiction though. Their relationship is a nuclear strike to the world of television.
Gundam has a long running tradition of leads easy to read as neurodivergent. These generally come in two flavours:
- Quiet and Weird Autism (Amuro, Kou, Heero, Loran, Kira, Setsuna, Daryl, Mikazuki, Jona, Nyaa)
- Loud and Angry AuDHD (Kamille, Judau, Usso, Domon, Shiro, Garrod, Shinn, Banagher, Io, Machu)
As Hayley quipped, Seabook is the rare exception. I'd argue that the men of the Asuno family are also neurotypical and simply have other baggage going on. I'd also argue that it's part of what makes AGE feel so strange and off-putting. Anyway, all this is to say that Suletta is simultaneously soft-spoken and constantly stammering, incapable of meeting people's gaze, constantly making the weirdest facial expressions yet also prone to loud outbursts showing she has no real vocal modulation, flying from task to task in strange orders unless she carefully builds a schedule full of alarms, adopts her mobile suit's fighting stance at the slightest provocation, never acknowledges her emotional eating and takes everything said to her literally. In a franchise full of neurodivergence, Suletta Mercury is the most autistic lead of all time. It feels like such a triumph every time someone works out how to communicate with her in a way she'll fully comprehend. Likewise, it's such a gut punch every time abuses her understanding to manipulate her. I know a couple of people who had to take breaks from the show around episode 17 or 18 because the consecutive blows from Miorine, Prospera and Ericht resonated far too closely with their own traumatic memories.
Every system contains the seeds of its own destruction and Elnora "Lady Prospera" Samaya's plan for revenge against the corporate conglomerate/private militia which killed everyone she cared about is a fun example. Her plot requires access to the top levels of the Benerit Group and that in turn is only possible through something shocking like Suletta being engaged to the CEO's daughter. Likewise, Suletta and Aerial have no support crew for duels unless they can find allies in a stratified, elite charter school for rich assholes. This can only work if Suletta is charismatic as well. She also needs to be loyal and pliable enough to not question whatever morally ambiguous activities Prospera engages in on the side. Thus, the only way for Prospera's revenge to come close to succeeding is if she raises a daughter who is trustworthy, honest and likeable. That is to say, Prospera is undone in the end because her plan involved being a good parent. Sure Suletta can be pliable, but she's also courageous and honest enough that enrollment in an elite school doesn't set off a desire to climb to the top, but rather to identify injustices and simply set about dismantling them. The entire cast of teenagers have massive parent issues and Suletta comes off as a radical because she actually grew up with someone who gave a damn about her. Perhaps the most beautiful image, as unsubtle as the best of Gundam is, occurs after the school's been levelled by a second Gundam attack. As everyone is completely shellshocked, Suletta who has just come to terms with the changes in relationship with her mother and sister simply says "we have to do what we can" then effortlessly lifts up a gigantic slab of concrete. She is both physically and emotionally stronger than she realises.
There's a couple of key character archetypes throughout Gundam: The Char and The Jerid. The Char is the mysterious, charismatic antagonist who's usually got serious mental health issues. Obviously our beloved mother of the century Prospera Mercury is filling that role here and does so admirably. The Jerid is a guy who thinks he's The Char but is instead a gigantic loser, prone to failing upwards because he's somehow managed to not die for longer than his peers. Sometimes The Char is also The Jerid. Iron Mask, Chronicle Ashter, Captain Mask (calling attention to your mask is a good way to become a Jerid), Gaelio Baudauin. Despite wearing a mask, Schwarz Bruder is not The Char of G Gundam. He's a Racer X. Ulube's The Char. Shinn Asuka is the only lead character to become The Jerid. Patrick Colasour is such a good puppy boy that he winds up on the right side of history and becomes King of the Jerids. Andrei Smirnov occupies the traditional role in Patrick's place. All this is to say that Guel Jeturk is the one Jerid to have a genuine redemption arc. He is forced to reconcile with his failures, his complicated relationship with his shitty violent father and navigate exactly what exactly he finds attractive in a woman. By the time of his final defeat, it's left ambiguous as to whether Suletta actually defeated him in a fencing duel despite no training or if he jobbed to her knowing that it's the right thing to do. He comes through it all a better person, and accepts that his fate is to spend the rest of his professional life being heckled by two of the rudest, cattiest people in the show.
Similarly, Miorine embraces the curse of the Gundam and what it entails: having an even bitchier, ruder sister in law who literally grew up Online in your ears at all times. This show deserves a sequel if only for the sitcom setups this enables.
Asticassia, the school is meant to be this simplistic simulation of the Benerit Group proper. It's an isolated playpen for the children of rich dipshits to learn engineering, business strategy and begin a lifetime of Byzantine politics. Likewise, the Benerit Group itself is a simplistic simulation of the world's broader geopolitics. Through its immense wealth and domination of arms manufacturing, it acts like it's the only political force that matters even though it's really more of a playpen for rich asshole adults. Real people are dying in the wars the Group funds, and the actual political bodies who actually wield the guns bought from the Group are increasingly fed up with their bullshit. Even without the show's events transpiring as they do, it's pretty clear that the Space Assembly League is looking for any excuse to seize every asset shored up here. It is perhaps a liberal dream to imagine the rich can still be held accountable by the rule of law, but it's a nice example of how wealth blinds people to the complexities of the world they live in.
This also means the show has a ton of untapped potential for a sequel. So much about the exact state of Earth's geopolitics, how many space colonies there are, who's running them and what they want is left intentionally vague. A lot of the cast have only just begun their lives and there's so much more development they can undergo. The show had to wrap up many plot details quickly due to the episodes allotted, but there's so many complications to those answers which can be explored in more detail. The conclusion of The Witch From Mercury is about as liberal a set of answers as you can get, and it would be fun to see a sequel either take a revolutionary bend or see just how far it can stretch that commitment to liberalism. In many ways this is not just the Gundam of the Joe Biden administration, but perhaps the single work of media that best represents the false reprieve his election in 2020 promised. Guess out here in the real world we're getting Alaya-Vijnana implants instead of cool masks.
As the years roll on, I think this show will be viewed in a complicated manner. It strives to meet its potential despite the obvious handicap and does the best it can in the circumstances. The cast, the ideas and the events are all so great but as a viewing experience it winds up a little unsatisfying. If 10 years from now we've seen 50 episode Gundam shows with fully realised queer relationships from their first episode as a basic assumption for the franchise, then we'll look back on this as Suletta truly being the key to unlock the gate. If corporate cowardice prevails, then The Witch From Mercury will be The One That Got Away; a final defiant roar from the dying Studio Sunrise.
Ultimately, it was nice for a show first conceived as the 40th anniversary project to maintain the trend of doing the occasional nod to the past without being a fully masturbatory nostalgia project or fanfiction.
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